i.
"In the old palace and the old house of pleasure the ceilings were high, the skirting corridors were wide, the rooms themselves were usually tens of feet long and wide and the darkness must always have pressed in like a fog."
In the far corners of her mind, past long rooms and wide corridors, Yuriko Oyama stands with her back against the wall and watches the world. Everything filters in palely now, like light through milk-tinted shoji. Shadow puppets dance slowly across the screen, bobbing their heads as they anxiously circle in search of the puppetmaster's approval. Nothing important will happen here, nor will she be permitted to spill blood within these five sacred walls. She is here only because he enjoys the sharp spice of intimidation.
Somewhere very far away, her fingers itch, metal plates resting not quite perfectly against her phalanges. They crack, one by one, and she watches the shadows jump.
She can remember a time when she could still look out at the world through the lintels of her mind. She can remember a time when Stryker listened, and even a time when he touched her shoulder in approbation, although when she lets the Stryker of the final memory slip past the corner of her eyes he shifts and wavers into a man with black hair and glacier blue eyes. She can remember smiling.
What she cannot remember is the path she trod as she backed into her mind. She thinks she was once elsewhere, but she cannot retrace her steps to return.
This is why Yuriko does not trust her memories.
ii.
"This was the darkness in which ghosts and monsters were active, and indeed was not the woman who lived in it, behind thick curtains, behind layer after layer of screens and doors -- was she not of a kind with them?"
Cherished or not, her memories now stand more solid than the world outside as they cluster around her to whisper in her ears. While the shadow puppets murmur on incomprehensibly, the black-haired man ruffles her hair and tells her to be strong, be strong, be strong. A boy with scarlet wings sits keening in the corner beneath a scroll of snow-capped mountains.
Stryker is there always, speaking sometimes with the voice of the present and sometimes with the voice of the past. The words are much the same. Humans cannot rest safely on this earth while mutants roam and twist and kill.
The black-haired man lies on the floor, entrails streaming across the mat, and nods his half-severed head in agreement. The edges of his eyes gleam with moisture, and the corners of his mouth droop down.
Yuriko knows the danger; she is it. She cannot remember a time when her head has not nodded in agreement as well. She has felt blood on her lips and watched it run like swollen raindrops down her claws.
"I'll keep you safe," Stryker promises, "under control."
"You'll help me?" she asks, and he nods, and then he says, "Kill."
Her hands twitch, and the shadow puppets twitch with them, but this is only memory. She clings to the lifeline dripping slowly through her veins and waits for his words. She is the danger, and that of all things she never doubts.
The black-haired man still bleeds on the floor, and the winged boy has fallen silent, huddled in a ball. Stryker's voice is clear against the hiss of the air shaft and the slow plink of the radiator.
"Watch," he says. She watches, safe.
iii.
"The darkness wrapped her round tenfold, twentyfold, it filled the collar, the sleeves of her kimono, the folds of her skirt, wherever a hollow invited. Further yet: might it not have been the reverse, might not the darkness have emerged from her?"
Later, when the orders are less clean, she hates herself for that feeling of safety. He is the human, and she is the danger, and he must know best. He tells her so himself, sketching out his plans. They are so very close to ending the threat.
And yet. And yet.
Blood still runs down her claws to mingle with the shadows at her feet, and the winged boy screams and screams. This is not the peace for which she came searching, if peace is why she came. It feels as though she has killed more now than in all the days before he took her under his protection.
The cause must be just, but the thought fills her with unease. Stryker is human, and yet, with her standing in his shadow, he has the power of a mutant. Perhaps it has corrupted him. Perhaps she has corrupted him. He listened to her, once.
Perhaps she came to him not in search of peace but to do precisely this. Yuriko wishes she knew better what she was before and how she stepped into this maze. She can remember him nodding to her, but she cannot remember what she said. It has been so long since she has spoken anything at all.
The black-haired man is standing again, and he whispers through his slitted throat, "Be strong."
iv.
"Our ancestors made of woman an object inseparable from darkness, like lacquerware decorated in gold or mother-of-pearl. They hid as much of her as they could in shadows."
At night, she tells herself she is collecting information for Stryker as she slips across the disturbingly quiet hill. She tells herself that he will want a copy of the latest building progress on his nightstand for the morning, and her legs slide smoothly through the building as quickly as her handprint can open the locks.
For Stryker has become a slow and quiet mantra in her head. It is not untrue. All that she does, she does for him, if not by his precise request.
"For Stryker," Yuriko tells herself as she opens the final door. There is an unexpected flurry of movement on the other side. Every nerve tenses as the mantra fades into the shadows. There is a man standing in front of her, though it is difficult to focus on him without Stryker telling her to look. She has been trained too well not to react to humans.
There is an old set of instructions about intruders, and she dredges it out onto her tongue.
"What are you doing in here?" she demands, as her vision sharpens around him. The shadows retreat, leaving her feeling exposed.
He answers incomprehensibly and scurries away. Only belatedly does she see the wastebasket and understand.
Her concentration has shattered almost beyond repair, but she half-heartedly starts the mantra again as she taps at the keyboard. The building plans would be easy enough to find, but there are other files on the computers as well, older documents on personnel and mutants and Stryker himself buried deeply within the system.
She knows the codes, for it has never occurred to Stryker to keep them from her. Yuriko Oyama stands in the back corners of her mind and tells her fingers to type them, though she can think of no conceivable reason for Stryker to want it done.
The hand lifts. Somewhere very far away, it closes into a fist, then opens. One by one, her knuckles crack, fingers never quite extending far enough to touch the keyboard.
A tear runs down the black-haired man's face. The winged boy spreads his pinions and takes flight, vanishing into the gloom.
v.
"Though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquillity holds sway."
The chamber of her mind is a strangely silent place now, though the shadows still cluster closely. In the quiet she feels relief. How could she manipulate Stryker, when she cannot so much as move against his wishes?
She tells the computer to print the building progress report when her hand finishes stretching and sits, perfectly still and eyes unfocused, while the printer spills each line of words across the page.
It occurs to her that Stryker may be interested in the autopsy on the previous night's experiment, and so she drags that file out of the depths and sends it scurrying after the first. The report is clinical. Death by exsanguination, it begins.
Yuriko takes a few steps further back into her mind and lets the words blur away.
There is peace here, with the ghosts vanished. If she does as she is told, the world will be safe. It must be, for she has no other choices.
Her mind stretches open behind her, corridor after corridor of shadows. She will not wait for the drugs to push her further down them. She finds the path where the darkness lies thickest, and follows it.
"And so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty."